The BBC Just Sent Out The Weirdest Breaking News Alert Of Modern Times

1. Users of the BBC News app can opt in to receive alerts for breaking news stories to keep updated with the news. But on Wednesday morning users received a rather odd alert.

Looks like @BBCBreaking news alerts have been hacked

— joncstone (@Jon Stone)

2. And pretty much everyone who gets the alerts took a screenshot to remember the occasion — and also go “WTF?”

I think someone at BBC breaking news alerts might have been on the sherry this morning.

— jessbrammar (@Jess Brammar)

3. And to make matters worse, the same message was sent out only two minutes later.

Er, what is going on with BBC app alerts?

— psmith (@Patrick Smith)

4. It has been suggested that developers are testing push notifications and these were sent out accidentally.

@psmith I'm no expert but I'd probably say a developer is about to get fired...

— Andrew_Isidoro (@Andrew Isidoro)

5. App users have now been sent an apology through a push notification.

Update:

— CallumIJones (@Callum Jones)

6. The BBC told BuzzFeed it is looking into what happened.

#savethedeveloper

— Psythor (@James O'Malley)

7. Update — 11:18 a.m.: The BBC has confirmed to BuzzFeed that the message was sent in error while testing new functions.

A spokesperson said: “We’ve been in the process of testing new functionality for our Apps and a test message was sent in error this morning. We apologise to our App users who were unnecessarily interrupted with the alert.”